You’ve probably all heard that Indian Prime Minister Modi ordered two of the most common high denomination bills (500 and 1,000 rupee) out of circulation and that they would no longer be legal tender after only a few days. India’s economy is, well, not modern. Most people do not have or use credit cards. Only […]

Melissa McKewn at Shakesville wrote a brilliant post four years ago that is even more relevant today. At the time, the Clintonistas and other deeply concerned feminists were troubled by the use of misogyny by both political parties but particularly the Democrats and even more particularly, the Obama campaign. Oh, you thought it was only the PUMAs that got poo flung at them? No, indeedy. It was any woman that had the temerity to speak up. Anyone who threatened to harsh Obama’s mellow was accused of being traitors, whiners, insignificant, stupid, and bringing catastrophe on the whole country.

We’re going through the same thing again this year. The past four years have been a disaster for women. It hasn’t been Christmas and Easter and New Years for women under this version of Democrats. It’s been more like Halloween. If you weren’t paying attention last time to the myriad ways that Obama bowed and scraped at the feet of evangelicals to get their votes, then the Bart Stupak amendment might have been your wake up call. Or maybe it was the retention of the Bush Administration’s conscience rule. Or maybe Rick Warren’s sexist, homophobic version of prosperity based Christianity pissed you off during the inauguration. Whatever it was, you figured out you had been screwed after it was too late to do anything about it.

But now that you know, what are your options going forward? Well, read Melissa’s post from four years ago that she republished a couple of days ago. It’s basically the same thing I’ve been saying for four years. You have the option to walk away. Also, Roe is dead, ladies. We didn’t fight for equality first and now, we’re back to the pre-Roe days where states could make their own rules. Pretty soon, abortions will only be available in a handful of coastal states, just like it was in the years immediately preceding Roe. And there are already 5 votes on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. Kennedy will vote to eliminate it when the time comes. So, there is really no compelling reason to pay any attention to the Democrats’ argument about Roe and the court. They might get more traction if they focused on the rights of workers or inequality in general or voting rights but, you know, that’s just not this version of the Democratic party’s thing.

One thing is for sure: if you don’t wring some concessions and explicit promises and sincere preliminary steps from the Democrats, and Obama in particular, BEFORE the election, you’re sure as hell going to get the shaft afterwards because the Democrats’ concern with your welfare extends only as far as getting your vote. Once they have that and get the power they want, you’re history to them. Don’t make it so easy.

Oh, sure, the party will start to incite panic. “What are you dooooooing?!? Don’t you know that there is an election this year? Why are you bringing up your rights now? You’re being selfish, stupid, old, unpleasant, unattractive. You’re collaborating with the Republicans, you’re a Tea Partier, you like that dunce Sarah Palin. If we don’t win it will be all your fault.” That is a guilt trip, my friends. That’s the sound of people who suddenly realize that the urgency on their part does not constitute an emergency on yours. Oh my god! You might actually *believe* in that stuff about bodily autonomy and agency and complete equality under the law. It will be very inconvenient for them to stop what they are doing to either pacify you or cater to you. I recommend that you make the Democrats kiss your asses. Forget about Republicans. They’re a lost cause.

Here’s how Melissa puts it (but go read the whole thing):

Forward movement for women can happen even in dictatorships, and can be reversed even in democracies—because women’s equality is inextricably linked to so many other cultural variables, like religiosity. To presume that greater democracy will de facto mean increased equality for women is to tacitly buy into Bush’s line about freedom magically emanating from any country deemed a functional democracy. It just doesn’t work that way. A democratically-elected conservative American theocracy would, for example, be anathema to feminism/womanism.

I have many good and important and personal reasons for not wanting the US to become any less democratic than it is now—not least of which is because those agitating for increased authoritarian control of government are simultaneously agitating for increased control of women’s bodies. I also have many good and important and personal reasons for fighting for my equality. Some of those good and important and personal reasons overlap. Some of them don’t.

The important point here is that, while most USian FWs are undoubtedly interested in voting for the most democratic candidate, it is wrong to reflexively conflate “more democratic” with “more feminist” (even though that’s historically a safe bet). FWs may, in fact, for reasons outlines above, have to votecounter to feminist/womanist principles to vote for the most democratic candidate of the two major parties. That is not a small thing, and it should not be treated as though it is.

I would remind Democrats that what happened to Jon Corzine in NJ could very well happen to Obama. Corzine as a governor was meh. He did nothing to reform the highly regressive property tax system here. He conducted a study and basically threw up his hands and said, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” Then he gave away our delegate votes to Obama at the convention. Um, Obama didn’t win NJ. Not even close. Hillary won it by 10 points. In general, Corzine looked like a Wall Street banker and governed pretty much the same way. Democrats here are still smarting from his loss to Chris Christie. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise though. NJ has a history of electing Republican governors. But that election should have been Corzine’s because, let’s face it, Christie isn’t a moderate Republican that would suit New Jersey’s tastes otherwise. He’s kind of crude, loud, a bully, a sexist asshole and definitely out to please his rich friends. There’s no expectation that he will reform the property tax system, only that he will strangle local governments from growing. And voters knew that going in. He’s been a disaster for New Jersey.

But Corzine lost anyway even though he was the favored Democrat in 2009 in a year when Democrats should have had an easy run. The local Democrats think it was a Christie revolution. I disagree. There was a third party candidate on the ballot that year. His name was Chris Daggett, an independent, and judging from his debate performances, one of which I was able to attend in person, he was the best candidate we had. Of course, the two major parties have a strangle hold on the ballots and every ballot in every county is different, so Daggett’s name wasn’t easy to locate. You want to know how it turned out. Here are the results?

You’d think the Democrats would have learned their lesson but apparently they haven’t. It doesn’t take much of a defection to flip a race to your opponent. And right now, there are a lot of women who are angry enough at the passivity of the Democrats and their arrogant attitude towards the voters that it might be better for US to take our votes elsewhere or split our ticket or not vote at all.

I don’t mean he’s not up the job of being president; I mean he’s not up to the job of being presidentright now. I’m sure he’d have made a fine president some other time, some decade of relative peace and prosperity, where the biggest demand on his capacity was “don’t fuck it up.”

But that is not the time in which we live.

We live in a time of crumbling empire and crumbling sidewalks, of failed wars and a failing economy, of social conservatives versus social justice, of a race between the middle class and the ozone layer to oblivion. We balance precariously on the brink of America and America 2.0, where hard decisions must be made about whether we are going to use our resources to keep giving gold-plated bootstraps to the already-privileged or start reinvesting in our fraying social safety net and brittle bridges.

We don’t need a steward; we need a leader. Not just any leader, either. We need the second coming of FDR. And Obama just isn’t the right guy.

I don’t pretend to know who the right guy, or gal, is—but I know with a clarity that rings like churchbells that it ain’t Obama.

This is correct. It is not racist to say so. It is simply an observation based on a careful evaluation of the data. Melissa could have reached this same conclusion three years ago, and I and thousands of other R&D professionals might still have jobs, but we’ll put that aside for now.

We have a bigger problem. Progressives can still be bamboozled. They still have buttons that are pushable. For example, in the same post, Melissa excerpts a portion of Feingold’s Netroots Nation keynote speech that speaks to the issue of corporations where he says:

“I think it’s a mistake for us to take the argument that they like to make that, ‘Well, what we’re going to do now is, we’re going to take the corporate money like the Republicans do and then after we win, we’ll change it.’ When’s the last time anyone did that? Most people don’t change the rules after they win by them. It doesn’t usually happen. It never happens,” Feingold said. “You know what? I think we’ll lose anyway if we do this. We’ll lose our soul when it comes to the issue of corporate domination.

I happen to agree with Feingold that people who win by taking huge sums of corporate campaign contributions or by bending the rules or cheating do not change the rules after they are elected. That’s why I couldn’t vote for Obama after he didn’t protest the way voters from Florida and Michigan were treated in the 2008 primaries. The process was extremely unfair to them, and by extension the rest of the Clinton voters. But he didn’t lift a finger to protect their votes because to do so meant that he _might_ lose the nomination. It wasn’t in his best interest to do that. It wasn’t that hard to eliminate Obama from my presidential material list based on his attitude towards voters back in February 2008. This is the guy who wrote off Appalachia. A whole swath of the country plagued by generational poverty and rapacious coal companies. Just wrote them off. Don’t need those votes or voters. They can go jump in a slag heap.

Your vote is sacred. Once it can be taken away from you, you have no power. This was more important than any corporate cash in 2008 and progressives missed it because they were misdirected. It wasn’t the money, it was the cheating. Repeat after me: “I will never vote for a politician who approves of nullifying the votes of 6 million people because if I can’t trust him to do the right thing *before* the election, I sure as hell can’t trust him to do it afterwards.”

Same with congressmen and senators and presidents and *superdelegates* who sell themselves to big corporate entities. They aren’t going to make the rules fairer for the rest of us because that might mean they will lose. Don’t expect them to do the right thing after the election if they are willing to sell themselves for big corporate donations before the election.

The only way to change this dynamic is to change the rule makers. You need to vote out the people who are whoring themselves for corporations and *particularly* the finance industry. Don’t say it can’t be done because you don’t have a choice. You must find a way.

But there is a degree of misdirection that progressives are prone to following to their detriment. What Feingold is doing is highlighting the evil heart of every corporation. Corporations are the problem, he seems to say. Bullshit. That’s like blaming the candy for being sweet. Corporations exist for a reason. It’s very hard for some industries to operate in any other way than a corporation. Let’s not act like children who don’t understand the concept of the corporation. They can’t be eliminated without harming our economy.

But they can be reined in. There’s no reason in the world why we should let them get away with murder. In fact, we’d be doing them a favor if we weren’t so permissive. Corporations are out of control right now eating everything in sight like a plague of locusts. They’re self-destructive. Pretty soon, they’re going to run out of things to eat and we will all suffer, MBAs and shareholders alike.

We used to have rules to make sure corporations didn’t have the upper hand in every interaction with their employees. We need to bring them back. We used to make sure they couldn’t offshore their profits to avoid taxes. We need to reinstitute them. You probably can’t do anything about the Citizens United ruling until one of the more conservative justices dies but for all we know, Sotomayor and Kagan aren’t a whole lot better. They just haven’t had a case to demonstrate how bad they are. You have to wonder why Bader-Ginsburg doesn’t retire so she can be replaced while there is still a Democrat in the White House. But she’s the last truly liberal justice on the court. When she’s gone, Obama may very well appoint a stealth justice. After all, who is really pulling his strings right now?

So, Feingold’s remarks are both right and irrelevant. This is the environment you operate in. Some American industries need a corporate model. Corporations pay obscene gobs of cash to easy congressional representatives and Senators who will write rules that are favorable to them. If you want to make the rules fairer, don’t get mad at the corporations. That’s not leading with your head and right now, you need to be cool and detached from the emotional string pulling crap. The corporations are not the ones who can change the rules. You need to go after the rule makers. You need to primary some incumbents with strong primary opponents. Use the money you would have donated to the Democratic party and feed it to people who wouldn’t be able to run in a party primary without kowtowing to the party line. Don’t donate to Act Blue or the DCCC or DSCC or what ever D org is calling you this week. You need to set up a separate funding mechanism that is outside of the Democratic party’s control or influence and recruit your own candidates. You need to become the progressive equivalent of the Christian Coalition.

To become really successful, you will have to reunite with the part of the party you willingly jettisoned for Obama in 2008. Make up with the working class voters of all educational backgrounds, the unions and women of all ages. You might have to abandon the creative class arrogance and the knee jerk responses to anything that isn’t crunchy granola. The good thing is that there are plenty of liberal values that you *can* agree on, especially when it comes to the economy. Stick to them and you can win. (I think Katiebird has four simple phrases that represent values that will work, where the heck are they…?)

The beast you have to starve is the party. Yeah, they’ll still get their money from corporations but you can drop your money in a different pile. And if other people do it and they tell two people and so on and so on, the pile of cash will get bigger and bigger and pretty soon, you can replace the rulemakers with people who vote for your interests and not some corporation’s.

The question is, do progressives have the balls to do it? Because from what I can see, the problem is not a lack of cash, it’s a lack of courage.

*************************

Here is Katiebird’s 12 Word Platform:

1. Medicare For All.
2. End The Wars.
3. Tax The Rich.
4. Jobs for Everyone

1. When I wrote passionate criticisms of a Republican administration and Republican Congressional majority who failed to champion LGBTQI equality, assailed women’s bodily autonomy, treated Roe as a suggestion, refused to disclose lobbyist visits to the White House, invoked the separation of powers to protect themselves, called for spending freezes on social programs, legitimized rightwing extremists, advocated for offshore drilling, pushed HSAs, escalated a war, thumbed their nose at due process, engaged in black ops, treated scientists with contempt, expanded the executive’s extrajudicial powers, demeaned liberal activists, and invoked state’s-secrets privilege for bullshit reasons, I was a principled progressive.

2. When I write passionate criticisms of a Democratic administration and Democratic Congressional majority who fail to champion LGBTQI equality, assail women’s bodily autonomy, treatRoe as a suggestion, refuse to disclose lobbyist visits to the White House, invoke the separation of powers to protect themselves, call for spending freezes on social programs, legitimize rightwing extremists, advocate for offshore drilling, push HSAs, escalate a war, thumb their nose at due process, engage in black ops, treat scientists with contempt, expand the executive’s extrajudicial powers, demean liberal activists, and invoke state’s-secrets privilege for bullshit reasons, I am a stupid ingrate who doesn’t understand how politics works.

Yes, Melissa, this is how they operate. In 2008, we were smart, politically savvy, astute observers of the body politic *until* we announced we were supporting Hillary Clinton, who we had determined from observation as the best qualified candidate for president. Suddenly, we weren’t smart anymore. No, we were racists, dried up pussies, stupid, low information, working class, uneducated. In general, we were stupid voters who had never paid any attention to how politics works. We lost a lot of friends. People ran screaming from us in terror in case the cooties we got were contagious. I mean, wouldn’t you rather be a hot, young, creative class voter than a tired old Roseanne Barr?

But we stuck it out because we are not Roseanne Barrs. We’re just people who happened to see the peer pressure tactics of the Obama machine for what they were.

Now, it’s YOUR turn to feel that kind of unpopularity. Isn’t it fun? Nothing you say will be taken seriously anymore. Your opinions can be dismissed. You’re naive, stupid, a whiner. You’re a loser. Oh sure, they loved you in 2008. That’s because they had you convinced that some dude was going to protect your reproductive rights better than some 60 year old woman or anyone from the Republican side of the aisle. And how did that turn out?

The funny thing is that we’re still personas non grata and you’ll probably gravitate to the other new losers. *You’re* not like one of *us*, right? What Jane Hamsher calls “a certain kind of woman”? And what kind of woman would that be? The kind that were right about Obama? I think Jane has us confused with some of the people who became Tea Partiers and birthers. That’s not who we are. And we’re not all women either. It’s a shame really. Together, we could be formidable and shake the bastards to the core. But as long as they continue to atomize the left by planting misrepresentations of Bill Clinton’s record in the comment sections of your blogs, keeping the former Clintonistas at arm’s length. we will never become a threat to them.

We would mail you out our complimentary Welcome to Under the Bus package with its white sheet and hormone replacement therapy starters but myiq2xu bristles when he doesn’t hear an acknowledgment that you piled on us during the primaries for no legitimate reason. I don’t argue with a homocidal clown.

One more thing:

This is for Peter Daou, who pointed out that it is Obama’s lack of principles that is the problem with the left blogosphere. I wrote this post about the very same thing about a year ago. I’m reprinting it here in it’s entirety. It’s not that we were cheering for Obama’s failure. We’re not Republicans. But we did expect him to do the right thing for all of the citizens of the US, not just the ones who funded him. Based on our observations of his career in the Senate, the way he ran his campaign and our own personal experiences in 2008, we had no reasonable expectations that he was going to govern as a Democrat. This is how his administration has played out, exactly as we predicted. Jane et al are little late to the party, Peter. They still hate us and have a weird notion of who we are. It’s leading to the marginalization of the left. There’s not much time to fix this. They need to get a clue and fast.

Actually, the Wolcott piece doesn’t belong. I just liked his description of Fox News gasbags like Karl Rove and Bob Beckel as “plump juicy roasters”. Wolcott makes it safe for the mixed metaphor. The piece is hillarious and spot on.

For the other three, the theme throughout is one of trying to make sense of several moves by the Obama administration and the various players in the economic mess. One gets the sense that what is going on is not that hard to figure out: The finance industry is taking us to the cleaners. It is going to prolong the recession/depression because it is going to be the last entity called upon to make any sacrifices. Each piece suggests that the White House is playing a dangerous game and gambling whole industries and our futures by engineering workarounds that won’t upset the bankers and their friends in the private investment clubs who stand to make out like bandits on our dime. Each solution is tailored to extract the least amount of pain from the wealthy and well connected and saddles the rest of us with the most risk. At the heart of this is the fact that each crisis is dealt with individually, as if the other crises were unrelated. Each is solved in isolation, deal by deal, banker by banker. And it’s ticking off the rest of the world.

Nicolas (pronounced nee-ko-la) Sarkozy may be a petulant prima donna but he’s right about one thing. The world cannot get on its feet economically if we continue to deal with the finance industry in a piecemeal fashion without regulatory fixes. If there continues to be separate deals for each problem and no international or domestic law to hold the financials accountable, there can be no trust or faith in the system. If there is no trust, there is no confidence that once leant, your money will come back to you. People understand risk. What they don’t understand is how their governments can allow them to be fleeced. Confidence needs to be restored to the system to make sure the money flows to where it is needed. That can’t happen until the big countries involved agree to set standards for financial transactions and regulations. We are global now.

But this is not something that is in Obama’s blood. Obama is of the “everything is on the table” variety of president. Actually, I don’t think we’ve ever had a president who has ever put his principles on such a sliding scale as this one. George W. Bush was a stickler for details compared to Obama. And Bill Clinton, that master of triangulation, at least had the perfectly rational excuse that he was faced with an overtly hostile Congress and national press. But what is Obama’s excuse for throwing away the tenets and principles of the party he comandeered to shmooze his way to the top? He has every advantage a president could want and still he sides with the bad guys.

Well, we shall see if Sarkozy follows through with his threat and walks out. Europe may not be doing enough to stimulate the economy but at least they aren’t stupid enough to throw more money at the banking industry and not ask, “And how do you intend to spend this?” You have to draw the line somewhere. And after all, a leader has to have principles.

OT

It occured to me that there are those who would argue that healthcare benefits that the unions demanded are ruining the auto industry. This is the lame excuse we hear from the plump juicy roasters on cable TV all of the time. You know, “Healthcare costs add $X to the cost of an automobile, blah, blah, blah.” It makes you kind of PO’d to buy a car if your mind is on how many gall bladder operations and hemorrhoid treatments those X number of dollars paid for. But even if the UAW *did* ask for so-called “gold-plated” policies {{snort!, like a working class guy isn’t going to have to run the insurance gauntlet anyway}}, the cost of those policies wouldn’t have increased so damned much if it hadn’t been for Harry and Louise.

Remember them?

If you don’t like the cost of the cars, you can send a thank you note to the GOP.

Thanks to all you readers who sent me suggestions on who to include on the blogroll. Every single one of them has been worth reading. Here are a couple of posts from the blogroll that are worth a read:

Let’s assume that come the general election, Hillary wins the states she has won and loses the states Obama has won. Similarly, Obama wins the states he has won so far and loses the states Hillary has won. Do the math and tell me who is the more viable candidate.

THIS is why we have Superdelegates. They do the math so we don’t have to. (Clinton people had this figured out on Tuesday night. And they said Obama has all the smart college edumacated supporters.)

This post at Shakesville, “Damned if you do…” by Melissa McKewn, explains the unacknowledged morass going on in many women’s heads this primary season. Just go read it. And mum’s the word.

The Clinton Cocktail Hour was a response to a challenge that Kos made to us poor Clinton supporters on DKos. He implied we didn’t have any friends or places to go, so we created one. Since my exile, the Cocktail Hour has lived on, tended diligently by the remnant of Hillary supporters who put up with the crazies on our behalf. I like having Cocktail Hour here as well or at least Nightcaps and I see that people are checking them out. But few people post and that sort of defeats the purpose of having cocktails in the first place. So, I’d like your advice. Should it stay or should it go? And if it stays, what day of the week is good? And finally, does anyone have any good cocktail music to recommend? I will take requests.

We are here and there. I suspect we’re a much greater number of bloggers and readers than our anemic numbers at DailyKos would indicate. If you are a reader and you feel that you’ve been thrown out of your tribe, never fear, you are in very good company. Obamagasms can’t last forever. And in the meantime, we are building a stable alternative blogoverse to carry on when the Big Blog Stores become mere shadows of their former selves. We will find each other, like rain, coalescing into streams, seeking the path of least resistance and merging into one mighty river. Hang in there.

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Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

"Barrett Brown has been released from prison; WikiLeaks publishes to celebrate: Today, investigative journalist Barrett Brown has been released from FCI Three Rivers to a halfway house outside Dallas, earlier than initially scheduled. His parents picked him up from the federal prison to drive him six hours to his new residence. Brown's release come […]